In November 2015, a federal court sentenced New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to twelve years in prison on corruption charges. The most serious charge hinted at the close connections between Silver, a Lower East Side assemblyman for nearly three decades, and luxury real estate. According to court records, Silver persuaded two real estate developers, Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group, to have one of his associates file assessments with the city to reduce the companies’ property taxes.[1] The prosecution also alleged that Silver worked with lobbyists to provide over one billion in tax breaks to Glenwood and prevented a drug treatment center from opening near one of the company’s residential buildings. In return, the associate siphoned off a portion of his legal fees to Silver and continued to assess more Glenwood buildings, an arrangement that netted the assemblyman roughly $700,000. In sum, prosecutors noted, “[Silver] postured himself as Mr. Tenant,” but remained “on a secret retainer to the landlords, to the wealthiest developer of real estate in New York City.”[2]

The defense made two claims in response to these charges: first, that Silver had not violated any state laws, which permitted assembly members to earn referral fees and outside income; and, second, that the arrangement between Glenwood, Witkoff, and Silver was not quid pro quo. A more telling feature of the defense’s argument, however, painted Silver as a symbol of immigrant success and advancement. Far from a crony of corporate real estate, Silver was a humble family man who had lived his entire life on the Lower East Side. A first generation Jewish immigrant, Silver had gone from the son of a hardware store owner to the Speaker of the Assembly, in turn becoming a leading voice for a small but active Orthodox constituency residing in a series of co-ops along Grand Street. These residents – and Silver – represented a living link to the Lower East Side’s storied immigrant past.[3]

Silver’s real estate connections – and these arguments – hint at both the real and imagined power Jews continued to hold on the late twentieth century Lower East Side. Indeed, the Jewish Daily Forward notes that the “troika of neighborhood power brokers that dominated local politics – Silver, William Rapfogel, the leader of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, and Heshy Jacob, the head of the United Jewish Council (UJC) – has only recently faded.[4] Nevertheless, scholars of urban and American Jewish history have yet to explore the origins, development, and influence of this “troika,” preferring to analyze the Lower East Side solely through the lens of early twentieth century immigrant life.

Jewish leaders like Silver, however, played a significant role in shaping Lower East Side policy during and after the 1970s. At this time, these leaders helped bring about an “era of big development” in the neighborhood, particularly within the Seward Park Extension, an urban renewal area located just north of Grand Street.[5] Silver and others viewed the Seward Park Extension as an important political base, a middle class enclave, and a symbolic tie to the Lower East Side’s Jewish past. To support their political influence, the UJC and Silver sought to limit low-income housing developments and build market-rate, luxury housing in the Extension. These actions reaffirmed broader waves of gentrification on the Lower East Side, particularly in new upscale areas like the East Village and Alphabet City, and reinforced the opportunities provided to high-end real estate and finance across New York at the time. As shown through Silver’s defense, Orthodox leaders on the Lower East Side ground this pro-growth agenda in a collective vision of neighborhood history that romanticized immigrant Jewish life and social mobility. The story of urban renewal in the Seward Park Extension thus suggests that the Lower East Side remained a key site for the development of both urban policy and Jewish politics long after the early twentieth century.

Plans to redevelop the Seward Park Extension date back to the late 1950s, when the Board of Estimate labeled a bloc of land north of Seward Park between Delancey and Grand Street a “substandard area.” In early 1959, the Urban Renewal Administration set aside over seven million dollars of federal money to redevelop this territory.[6] Six years later, the Housing and Redevelopment Board (HRB) proposed to build 1,800 new apartments in the Seward Park Extension, reserving 1,240 for middle-income families and 200 for the elderly.[7] According to the agency, these changes would “replace a warren of antiquated, worn-out, and neglected buildings with a...healthy mixture of low and moderate income residency.”[8] Importantly, the HRB also called for the city to construct two new public housing projects for Seward Park Extension residents displaced by urban renewal.[9] While both the City Planning Commission and Board of Estimate approved this plan in 1965, controversies over tenanting the new projects and developing the site, chiefly between Jewish groups and Puerto Rican residents, repeatedly stalled these redevelopment efforts.[10]

Source: NYCHA

It was not until 1988 when the Koch administration – engaged in policy debates about the fate of abandoned city-owned, or in rem, land – issued a new redevelopment proposal for the Seward Park Extension. Under the plan, the Lefrak Organization would buy one Extension site for $1 and sell 400 new condominiums there at market value. The company would then combine the revenue from these sales with a municipal subsidy of $25,000/unit to construct 800 middle and moderate-income rental apartments elsewhere on the Extension site. To earn tax exemptions on the properties, Lefrak also agreed to reserve 20 percent of these new rental units for low and moderate-income families.[11]

While the mainstream press praised the plan, it failed to bridge the political gap between two main Lower East Side constituencies: the United Jewish Council (UJC), a Grand Street social agency that served the neighborhood’s elderly Jewish population, and the Joint Planning Council (JPC), an umbrella organization comprised mostly of religious and civic groups representing low-income Puerto Rican residents.[12] Throughout the 1980s, the UJC and JPC offered sharply contrasting visions of urban redevelopment. While the former backed the Lefrak proposal, the latter viewed the plan’s stipulations and income requirements as a sell out to real estate that would accelerate Lower East Side gentrification.

In the late 1980s, the JPC lobbied Manhattan Borough President and future mayor David Dinkins to revise the Lefrak plan. While Dinkins remained non-committal, he promised the JPC that the agency’s “concerns over the future of the Seward Park site would be relieved” if he became mayor in 1989.[13]

Initially, Dinkins followed through on his promise. In 1991, Felice Michetti, Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Preservation (HPD), worked with the JPC, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and other members of the Dinkins administration to find additional sites for new NYCHA units recently distributed by the Department of Housing and Urban (HUD). After an exhaustive search, HPD officials pitched the idea of building these complexes in tandem with middle-income housing on the Seward Park Extension. By the end of 1991, Dinkins had signed off on this proposal. The new NYCHA-HPD plan reserved one-third of the Lefrak site for public housing and the remaining two-thirds of the site for moderate and middle-income housing.[14] Importantly, the proposal eliminated luxury housing from the Seward Park Extension.

As it worked to implement the NYCHA-HPD plan, the Dinkins administration equated the JPC’s position with the interests of the entire Lower East Side, a sign that Dinkins recognized the neighborhood’s low-income needs. In November 1991, for instance, Felice Michetti backed the proposal in a letter to Deputy Mayor Barbara Fife because it provided the “long-term affordability for the low-income units that the community has long sought.” In this same letter, Michetti told Fife that NYCHA head Laura Blackburne had recently met with the “Lower East Side community” to outline the NYCHA-HPD proposal. The memo also compared this proposal favorably to other mixed-income plans “much heralded by the Lower East Sidecommunity.” At a meeting between NYCHA Chair Laura Blackburne and the JPC, NYCHA staffers also distinguished between the Lower East Side “community” from the “Grand Street community.”[15] In so doing, they viewed groups like the UJC not as representatives of the entire Lower East Side, but as a vocal minority residing within a particular sector of the neighborhood.

The JPC enunciated a similar vision of the Lower East Side in letters to Dinkins about implementing the NYCHA-HPD plan. In June 1992, Reverend Kevin P. O’Brien, the Regional Vicar for southern Manhattan, speaking on behalf of twenty-one Catholic churches in the neighborhood, argued that the proposal maintained the “economic and social viability of the City of New York’s low-income neighborhoods” by injecting them with mixed-income housing and new commercial space. O’Brien ground this idea in a specific view of the Lower East Side past, arguing that the neighborhood had historically housed the “low income and working families from around the World who have come to this community seeking opportunity” – the “struggling people” who had immigrated and migrated to the neighborhood and had practiced in the church for the past “170 years.”[16] Other JPC organizations made similar claims. In a letter to Dinkins, Shawn G. Demunnick, a reverend from St. Mary’s church, located just south of the Seward Park Extension, told the mayor that his Lower East Side policies could uphold his vision of New York City as a “great mosaic.” In the letter, Demunnick alluded to the neighborhood’s constant “Immigrant Population” and argued that the “need for housing remains constant and crosses all ethnic boundaries.”[17] These claims thus situated blacks and Puerto Ricans within a both real and imagined history of social activism on the Lower East Side and illustrated the ways in which Lower East Side history remained a highly contested tool for political conflict in the early 90s.

Sheldon Silver and the UJC, however, pressured Dinkins to abandon the NYCHA-HPD plan. Dinkins first met UJC representatives during his campaign for Manhattan Borough President in 1985. At that time, he allegedly told the group that he understood the “significant cultural, religious and historical importance of the Lower East Side to the Jewish community.” Shortly thereafter, he met with UJC leaders to discuss the Seward Park Extension.[18] Dinkins also penned articles in the agency’s newsletter, the Lower East Side Voice, and The Jewish Press, which maintained a large Orthodox readership. Charting the influx of various immigrant groups into the neighborhood, Dinkins claimed that Jews had left a permanent institutional and intellectual mark on the area and praised attempts to preserve “the rich history of the Jewish people in the Lower East Side.”[19] Roughly one year later, Dinkins appeared with Sheldon Silver at the 12th Annual Lower East Side Jewish Festival and called Jews on the Lower East Side “one of the most famous and important Jewish communities in the world.”[20]

These statements, however, did little to assuage the UJC’s criticism of Dinkins. In the late 1980s, the agency pressured Dinkins to take a formal position on Seward Park Extension housing issues. When he did not, the UJC accused Dinkins, then Manhattan Borough President, of caring little about “preserving the Jewish community in the area.”[21] By the end of 1987, Herbert Block, Dinkins’ aide to Jewish communities across New York, specifically noted that the “UJC is likely upset that we have not taken a position on what should be done with the [Seward Park Extension] site and have not followed up on this issue with them.”[22] UJC leaders then lobbied Dinkins against the NYCHA-HPD plan in 1992 and 1993. Rabbi Yitzchok Singer, the UJC President, reminded Dinkins of the “importance of this property to the stability and growth of New York’s oldest and historic Jewish community.” “I would assume,” Singer continued, “that we will be contacted to join in consultation with you and your relevant staff concerning the development of plans for said site.”[23] In May 1992, apparently having not received a response from Dinkins, UJC Executive Director Rabbi Yehuda Kravitz told the mayor that he had “totally [ignored] our past correspondence on an issue so vital to the very existence New York’s oldest and historic Jewish community.” Singer also demanded that Dinkins “contact and involve” the UJC in all future discussions about development plans for the site.[24]

This pressure – applied as Dinkins faced major budget deficits, the prospect of further alienating Jewish voters after the city’s infamous Crown Heights riots, and a potentially close reelection campaign – led Dinkins to drop his support for the NYCHA-HPD plan. In June 1992, after hearing UJC gripes on the proposal, Dinkins aides advised the mayor not to meet with Reverend Kevin O’Brien, a local Catholic leader, partly because “the local Jewish community is not at all supportive of the plan.”[25] By August 1992, Dinkins had cancelled three meetings with the JPC to discuss the Seward Park site, twice due to scheduling conflicts and once because the project lacked funding. In turn, JPC chairs Carlos Garcia and Valerio Orselli implored Dinkins to use his mayoral influence to get the project off the ground, reminding him that “since the Housing Authority and the HPD are ‘on board…it remains for City Hall to be the engine that drives the machine.” Three months later, Garcia wrote another letter to Dinkins reminding him that, as Borough President, he had promised that “our concerns over the future of the Seward Park site would be relieved” when he became mayor and that he had broken several promises to meet with the group.[26]

Then, in early 1993, the JPC sent a letter to Fife praising Dinkins’ housing budget and confirming the administration’s support for the NYCHA-HPD plan. However, Fife attached a note to this letter stating that she needed to meet with Sheldon Silver before taking a position.[27] At a subsequent meeting, Silver told Fife that the Seward Park area possessed too much low-income housing already and, perhaps confident that Dinkins would soon lose the mayor’s seat, urged the administration to delay the project until after the 1993 election.[28] Around this time, the Dinkins administration continued to stall the NYCHA-HPD plan. When one JPC member, the Cooper Square Committee, advised the administration not to “put off sound policies because of conservative and often volatile segments of the population’s reaction,” a clear reference to the Grand Street Jewish community, Dinkins staffer Nancy Devine, reiterated that the plan deserved “broad local support” and required the administration to “work with all elements of the community.”[29] Several months later, Fife acknowledged in a memo to Dinkins that opposition from Jewish leaders like Silver had made NYCHA hesitant to build low-income housing in the Seward Park Extension. She then advised Dinkins to turn down the JPC’s repeated requests to meet.[30] The mayor reiterated this message in a letter to JPC Chairman Carlos Garcia that outlined the city’s budgetary issues and noted that the “future of Seward Park rests on finding a plan that has broad local support.” “To date,” the mayor told Garcia, “this has not been achieved.”[31] In the end, the Dinkins administration, despite its earlier promises, never implemented the NYCHA-HPD plan. As a result, the Seward Park Extension would remain vacant for the next two decades.

Today, planners have at last broken ground on the Seward Park Extension, now dubbed Essex Crossing. A 1.9-million-square foot and six-acre development, Essex Crossing will include a movie theater, a bowling alley, several new commercial stores, a community center, and 1,000 new apartments, one-half of which will go to low-, moderate-, and middle-income families.[32] In some respects, Essex Crossing reveals the decline of Grand Street as a center of Jewish political power. Before his arrest, Sheldon Silver acknowledged that the new redevelopment proposal reflected “the needs and wishes of our neighborhood,” a statement that contradicted his earlier positions on low-income housing and suggested that the Grand Street co-ops had become younger and more diverse.[33]

Nevertheless, it took planners roughly forty years to implement a plan for the Seward Park Extension. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mayor Dinkins proved unable to navigate the stormy waters of ethnic, particularly Jewish-Puerto Rican, politics on the Lower East Side. His abandonment of the NYCHA-HPD plan signaled the primacy of pro-growth policies in both the neighborhood and New York as a whole. In helping block the implementation of local low-income housing alternatives, Orthodox leaders like Sheldon Silver and the UJC linked Jewish history on the Lower East Side to the broader prerogatives of corporate redevelopment and real estate. These efforts both reflected and strengthened Grand Street’s powerful standing in late twentieth century New York City politics.

Barry Goldberg is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

[1] Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Sheldon Silver’s Fall Signals End of a (Jewish) Era in New York Politics,” The Jewish Daily Forward, January 22, 2015; Charles V. Bagli, “Developer Who Keeps Low Profile is Embroiled in Silver Scandal, The New York Times, January 26, 2015; Doug Chandler, “Bracing for Life Without Shelly,” The New York Jewish Week, April 13, 2016; Benjamin Weiser and Vivian Yee, “Sheldon Silver, Ex-New York Assembly Speaker, Gets 12-Year Prison Sentence,” The New York Times, May 3, 2016.

[2] United States of America v. Sheldon Silver, Trial Transcript, November 3, 2015, 15 Cr. 0093, 25-29, PACER (Southern District of New York. 2015); United States of America v. Sheldon Silver, Trial Transcript, November 13, 2015, 15 Cr. 0093, 1719-1720 (Southern District of New York. 2015); United States of America v. Sheldon Silver, Trial Transcript, November 23, 2015, 15 Cr. 0093, 2845, 2902-03, PACER (Southern District of New York. 2015).

[5] Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 259.

[6] City Planning Commission Summary of Seward Park Extension Plan, June 2, 1965, Citizens Housing Planning Council Papers, Box 36, Folder 8, Citizens Housing Planning Council Archives and Library (New York, NY); “Aid for City Housing: U.S. Sets Aside 7 million for Lower East Side Project,” The New York Times, January 7, 1959.

[7] “Housing and Redevelopment Board Finalizes Plans for a New Seward Extension,” East Side News, April 23, 1965.

[10] City Planning Commission Summary of Seward Park Extension Plan, June 2, 1965, Citizens Housing Planning Council Papers, Box 36, Folder 8, Citizens Housing Planning Council Archives and Library; Charles G. Bennett, “Renewal is Voted in East Side Area,” The New York Times, July 23, 1965.

[11] Alan Finder, “Koch and Lefrak Agree on Plan for 1,200 Middle-Income Units,” The New York Times, February 29, 1988; Alan S. Oser, “Perspectives: The Lefrak Plan, Using Condo Sales to Assist New Rentals,” The New York Times, April 10, 1988.

[32] Charles V. Biagli, “City Plans Redevelopment for Vacant Area in Lower Manhattan,” The New York Times, September 17, 2013; Alison Gregor, “The Lower East Side Goes from Gritty to Glossy,” The New York Times, May 29, 2015; Ronda Kaysen, “New Mixed-Income Housing on the Lower East Side,” The New York Times, July 24, 2015.

[33] Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Lower East Side Development Spells Decline of Old Jewish Power Brokers,” The Jewish Daily Forward, March 4, 2013.